Bridgewater Triangle’ documentary premieres Sunday

Thursday

Oct 17, 2013 at 12:01 AMOct 17, 2013 at 5:16 PM

It’s no coincidence “The Bridgewater Triangle” documentary is premiering at a time even the most level-headed skeptic has been known to seek out a good old-fashioned spine-chilling thrill. Two years in the making, the documentary will premiere Oct. 20 at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.

Rebecca Hyman

It’s no coincidence “The Bridgewater Triangle” documentary is premiering in October when even the most level-headed skeptic has been known to seek out a good old-fashioned spine-chilling thrill.

“People who aren’t even necessarily paranormal enthusiasts are interested in spooky things this time of year,” said Aaron Cadieux, co-producer and co-director with Manny Famolare.

Two years in the making, the documentary will premiere Sunday, Oct. 20 at 2 p.m. in the UMass-Dartmouth main auditorium.

In 1983, Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman published his book “Mysterious America,” in which he describes a 200-square-mile region “with a long history of paranormal activity.”

Coleman called the region the “Bridgewater Triangle” and 30 years later Cadieux and Famolare have made the first comprehensive, feature-length film exploring the fascinating and forbidding subject.

In the film’s trailer, Coleman calls the Triangle — which includes all three Bridgewaters, Raynham, Mansfield, Norton, Easton, Brockton, Taunton, Abington, Freetown and Rehoboth — a “magnet for weird phenomena.” Over the years, people have reported seeing UFOs, Bigfoot, ghostly panthers, giant birds, fiendish dogs, a disappearing hitchhiker and unexplained disembodied lights and noises, and that’s just a sampling of the eerie goings-on.

Cadieux and Famolare approached the project from a “journalistic” perspective, presenting the evidence and letting the viewers decide for themselves the explanation. For his part, Cadieux is a paranormal sceptic and professional filmmaker, who loves a good ghost story and whose favorite holiday has always been Halloween.

Famolare, on the other hand, is more inclined to believe in a world beyond what science can explain.

A lifelong East Bridgewater resident, the Brewster paramedic grew up at the center of the Triangle hearing eerie tales about the region and developed a keen interest in such mysteries.

When he was a little boy of just 6 or 7, he remembers a family friend talking about birds vanishing over Lake Nippenicket. At the time, he had a VHS camera half the size of a dining room table and was already determined to make a movie on the subject.

Thirty years later, Famolare is proud to be part of a professional filmmaking crew he considers top-notch.

“I hope when people see it they will be very surprised at the production quality. It’s not just people running around the woods with video cameras,” Famolare said.

Coleman is just one of the many experts in the film’s impressive cast, which also includes Chris Pittman, who has appeared on “Ancient Aliens” on the History Channel; John Brightman, founder of New England Paranormal; Wayne Nye, founder of East Bridgewater Ghost Tours; Ann Kerrigan, founder of East Bridgewater’s Most Haunted; and Chris Balzano, author of “Dark Woods” and “Ghosts of the Bridgewater Triangle.”

And the narrator is John Horrigan, a professional sports announcer for the Boston Bruins Alumni.

Cadieux and Famolare have spent countless hours researching the subject, poring over newspaper archives from the 1700s to the present, visiting historical societies, reading book after book and interviewing eye witnesses, many of them on the very spot where they report having experienced something inexplicable, often deep in the Hockomock Swamp, which not coincidentally means “devil’s swamp” or “place where evil spirits dwell” in Algonquin.

Famolare said the documentary is not intended to be a horror movie. For the most part, it is more intriguing than terrifying. But sometimes truth can be scarier than fiction and there are some eerie accounts that “would give people goose bumps,” he said.

The segments on the vanishing red-headed hitchhiker on Route 44 in Rehoboth and the history of cult-tinged violence in Freetown State Forest come to mind.

“The best stories come from people who’ve never heard of the Bridgewater Triangle. They say, ‘I was driving down Route 44 and saw this guy and then looked in my rearview mirror and he was gone.’ I ask, ‘Have you ever heard of the Bridgewater Triangle?’ and they say no. It really makes you think,” Famolare said.

The filmmakers would ultimately like to see their documentary air on national television, perhaps on the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, the Travel Channel or Syfy, all of which have ventured into the paranormal arena.

In the meantime, they will be hitting the film festivals and hope to soon release the Triangle on Blu-ray and DVD.

The documentary premieres at 2 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 20, at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. For tickets or more information, go to thebridgewatertriangledocumentary.com.

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